It's virtual college - get your degree off the web

Most of the budding art historians who attended Vincent Scully's lecture last semester expected nothing more than the textbook and the presence of the eminent scholar. To the pleasant surprise of the students, though, the web page for Scully's class boasted an extensive network of online paintings, a convenient supplement to the Yale University Art Gallery and the Center for British Art. Indeed, students in a broad range of disciplines—from languages to history—have noticed the resources, too.

ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD/YH Director of Instructional Computing Edward Kairiss (above) and ITS Director Philip Long (below).

At a time when technology has something to offer to every field imaginable, Yale's Information Technology Services (ITS) is eager to make its resources available in the classroom. "We are interested in how technology affects teaching and learning," ITS Director Philip Long said. More than 380 courses this semester have made use of the extensive capabilities of the classes.yale.edu server. Indeed, what is striking about ITS is that it has implemented academic web resources across a broad range of disciplines. But that page is only a fraction of the technology ITS has to offer to Yale's academic world.

The ITS officials say they are dedicated to serving student needs, but much of the funding and assistance has been directed at professors, who can choose to incorporate technology into their classrooms. "What distinguishes us is that we're tuned in with the faculty," Director of Instructional Computing Edward Kairiss said. "We can give them more resources for publishing digitally, or really for whatever they can imagine." A new Center for Media Initiatives has been created to provide intensive support for three to five innovative faculty projects a year. ITS makes a line-up of "Instructional Innovation Grants" available, and eight separate grants were awarded to professors last year alone in fields spanning from the humanities to the natural sciences.

Even with all the programs available, "Some of the professors who have been around a long time aren't initially eager to get involved with this `new-fangled technology,'" Kairiss said. "But most of them say that students start coming up and asking, `Where's the web page?' Once they start doing that, the effort increases."

To supervise and complement the technological resources, a department called Academic Media and Technology (AM&T) has grown prodigiously in the last year. Long said he divides AM&T tasks and projects into three broad categories. At the foundational level are broadly popular, easily used services that appeal to a wide variety of participants: e-mail, course web tools, analog and digital sound systems. Next comes an "Exploration" level, for which grants on the order of $10,000 are available. At the top of the pyramid is the "Innovation" level, for which grants of up to $100,000 are available for large-scale projects.

Last September, Yale, Oxford, Princeton, and Stanford each pledged $3 million toward launching the largest online effort to date to create a slate of arts and science courses available on the web. This "online alliance" is likely to be operational by the end of the year.

Another large-scale media project is the flourishing Digital Media Center for the Arts (DMCA), a facility created to incorporate traditional art and the technology of the computer age. "The DMCA is full of fantastic resources," Andrew Camargo,TC '02, who works in the DMCA and has used its equipment for his filmmaking, said. "If you've got digital footage, you can do just about anything."

One professor who has taken advantage of the web technology AM&T has to offer is Kathryn Alexander, director of undergraduate studies for music. She and her colleagues conceived of a web-based hub which would allow students to listen to music for their classes online. Up to 2,000 undergraduates are enrolled in music classes at any given time, an immense student base that stands to benefit from such a convenience.

"A lot of places have computer music technology, but we wanted something more widespread, something that would reach a wide range of people," Alexander said. "Listening to music is something that everyone in this community does in their music classes. It's a wonderful opportunity."

Alexander has received eight grants totaling $161,000 for the project. The result is Virtual Concert Hall, a website containing an archive of more than 6,000 separate audio files. Using real-time streaming protocol, thousands of students in 30 music classes can listen to music for their classes with Apple's Quicktime. Many of the files are classical music, but the site contains hundreds of jazz, pop, and ethnic files for the diverse array of music classes available to students.

"Virtual Concert Hall is especially nice for students to have around during finals week, when the music library is overcrowded and the CDs you want are checked out," Jess Tyre, one of the music technology experts who actually compresses music files onto the database, said.

Yale has not been alone in its mission to bring media and technology closer to the classroom. Last spring, Harvard reported that it would experiment with a limited slate of graduate courses online. In addition, Harvard has encouraged undergraduates to take advantage of a system for personal web pages under the domain my.harvard.edu.

"We collaborate with our peer institutions, but most of all we collaborate within the University," Kairriss said. "It's not the case of `build it and they will come,' but the opposite."

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